Thursday, February 28, 2013

Something Is Not Right With This Case In Singapore

Something like this was not supposed to happen in Singapore. Its a brilliant piece of investigative journalism by FT. Its also very sad for the family involved. The whole thing reads like a convoluted but brilliant movie script .... C'mon Singapore, come clean ...The entire article is so very long like a mini novel but very gripping, read the rest at this link:

Death in Singapore

By Raymond Bonner and Christine Spolar

On June 24 last year, the body of a young US electronics engineer, Shane Todd, was found hanging in his Singapore apartment. Police said it was suicide, but the Todd family believe he was murdered. Shane had feared that a project he was working on was compromising US national security. His parents want to know if that project sent him to his grave

Shane Todd on a dragon boat in Singapore during an outing with friends and colleagues in 2011. This is one of a number of images featured on Shane’s Facebook page. The photographs of Shane Todd have been provided by the Todd family

Mary and Rick Todd were anxious about entering the apartment where their oldest son had lived and died. Late last June the couple had flown from Montana to Denver to Los Angeles to a colonial-era house in the Chinatown district of Singapore to try to make sense of an unthinkable loss: Shane Todd, a young engineer who had just wrapped up an 18-month stint with a government research institute known as IME, was dead – an apparent suicide, according to the Singapore police. Mrs Todd felt her heart pounding as she climbed the narrow staircase to his apartment and thought about what the police had told her two days earlier.

Shane had died a week before he was to return to the US. The police said he had drilled holes into his bathroom wall, bolted in a pulley, then slipped a black strap through the pulley and wrapped it around the toilet several times. He then tethered the strap to his neck and jumped from a chair. Shane, 6ft 1in and nearly 200lb, hanged himself from the bathroom door, the autopsy report said.

More

IN FT MAGAZINE

So the Todds, along with two of Shane’s younger brothers, John and Dylan, were unnerved by what theydidn’t see as they crossed the threshold. The front door was unlocked and there was no sign of an investigation – no crime-scene tape, no smudges from fingerprint searches. “The first thing I did was make a beeline for the bathroom,” Mrs Todd recalled. She wanted to see exactly how Shane had died – and she saw nothing that fitted the police description. The marble bathroom walls had no holes in them. Nor were there any bolts or screws. The toilet was not where the police had said.